Women of the Confederacy

Winnie Davis Monument in "Hollywood" Richmond Virginia

In Richmond, when the hospitals were
filled with wounded men brought in from the seven days' fighting
with McClellan, and the surgeon found it impossible to dress
half the wounds, a band was formed, consisting of nearly all the
married women of the city, who took upon themselves the duty of
going to the hospitals and dressing wounds from morning till
night; and they persisted in their painful duty, until every man
was cared for, saving hundreds of lives, as the surgeons
unanimously testified. When nitre was found to be growing
scarce, and the supply of gunpowder was consequently about to
give out, women all over the land dug up the earth in their
smoke-houses and tobacco barns, and with their own hands
faithfully extracted the desired salt, for use in the government
laboratories.

Many of them denied themselves not only
delicacies, but substantial food also, when, by enduring
semi-starvation, they could add to the stock of food at the
command of the subsistence officers. I, myself, knew more than
one houseful of women, who, from the moment that food began to
grow scarce, refused to eat meat or drink coffee, living
thenceforth only upon vegetables of a speedily perishable sort,
in order that they might leave the more for soldiers in the
field. When a friend remonstrated with one of them, on the
ground that her health, already frail, was breaking down utterly
for want of proper diet, she replied, in a quiet, determined
way, "I know that very well; but it is little that I can do, and
I must do that little at any cost. My health and life are worth
less than those of my brothers, and if they give theirs to the
cause, why should not I do the same? I would starve to death
cheerfully, if I could feed one soldier more by doing so, but
the things I eat can't be sent to camp, I think it a sin to eat
anything that can be used for rations." And she meant what she
said, too, as a little mound in the churchyard testifies.

Every Confederate remembers gratefully
the reception given him when he went into any house where these
women were. Whoever he might be, and whatever his plight, if he
wore the gray, he was received, not as a beggar or tramp, not
even as a stranger, but as a son of the house, for whom it held
nothing too good, and whose comfort was the one care of all its
inmates, even though their own must be sacrificed in securing
it. When the hospitals were crowded, the people earnestly
besought permission to take the men to their houses and to care
for them there, and for many months almost every house within a
radius of a hundred miles of Richmond held one or more wounded
men as especially honored guests.

"God bless these Virginia women," said a
general officer from one of the cotton states, one day; "they're
worth a regiment apiece." And he spoke the thought of the army,
except that their blessing covered the whole country as well as
Virginia.